Typical examples, that is, examples that are representative for a particular situationor concept, play an important role in human knowledge representation and reasoning.In real life situations more often than not, instead of a lengthy abstract characteriza-tion, a typical example is used to describe the situation. This well-known observationhas been the motivation for various investigations in experimental psychology, whichalso motivate our formal characterization of typical examples, based on a partial orderfor their typicality. Reasoning by typical examples is then developed as a special caseof analogical reasoning using the semantic information contained in the correspondingconcept structures. We derive new inference rules by replacing the explicit informa-tion about connections and similarity, which are normally used to formalize analogicalinference rules, by information about the relationship to typical examples. Using theseinference rules analogical reasoning proceeds by checking a related typical example,this is a form of reasoning based on semantic information from cases.

This report presents the main ideas underlyingtheOmegaGamma mkrp-system, an environmentfor the development of mathematical proofs. The motivation for the development ofthis system comes from our extensive experience with traditional first-order theoremprovers and aims to overcome some of their shortcomings. After comparing the benefitsand drawbacks of existing systems, we propose a system architecture that combinesthe positive features of different types of theorem-proving systems, most notably theadvantages of human-oriented systems based on methods (our version of tactics) andthe deductive strength of traditional automated theorem provers.In OmegaGamma mkrp a user first states a problem to be solved in a typed and sorted higher-order language (called POST ) and then applies natural deduction inference rules inorder to prove it. He can also insert a mathematical fact from an integrated data-base into the current partial proof, he can apply a domain-specific problem-solvingmethod, or he can call an integrated automated theorem prover to solve a subprob-lem. The user can also pass the control to a planning component that supports andpartially automates his long-range planning of a proof. Toward the important goal ofuser-friendliness, machine-generated proofs are transformed in several steps into muchshorter, better-structured proofs that are finally translated into natural language.This work was supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, SFB 314 (D2, D3)